talk

Or Gallery Berlin is pleased to present Marina Vishmidt in Speculating with the Duck of Doubt?, for the third of our speaker series Inclinations hosted by Patricia Reed.

This will be in the character of a light overview of some of the salient problems that confront us when trying to define terms and prospects in burgeoning debates about speculation in art, philosophy, politics and money. ‘Pure’ philosophy and cultural theory, art curation and feminist epistemology have all applied the ‘speculative realist turn.’ A critique of these tendencies may be quick to collapse them all into ‘speculative fetishism’, while at the same time the theoretical axioms of this turn may misrecognize earlier totalizations of the ‘speculative’ as impermissibly ‘subject-centred’. But these terms grow increasingly evacuated and frustrating to the non-partisan. The duck of doubt is known to create universal emptiness, without the aid of a ‘pneumatic machine’. (Lautreamont) We will let it flap for a while as week seek to rescue speculation from the vacuum.

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and the value-form. She has just completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London on ‘Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital’. She held posts including the DAAD Research Grant at the University of Hamburg (2012), the Montehermoso Research Grant (2011/12), critic-in-residence at the FRAC Lorraine (2009) and a fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2007/8). She holds a MA from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. She is the co-editor of Uncorporate Identity (2010) with Metahaven, and Media Mutandis: Art, Technologies and Politics (NODE. London,2006). She is a regular contributor to catalogues, edited collections and journals such as Mute, Afterall, Parkett and Texte zur Kunst. She also takes part in the collective projects Unemployed Cinema, Cinenova and Signal:Noise. She is currently writing a book with Kerstin Stakemeier on the politics of autonomy and reproduction in art (Hamburg: Textem, forthcoming).

The presentation of work revolves around the posing of a question that is the thrust of a guest’s activities. It goes without saying that questions may not be answered, but are grappled with in their unresolvability. An inclination is the force of attraction to a question (without a straightforward response), yet also to each other, as a community who partakes in a common quest(ion).
Hosted by Patricia Reed

Arriving at a question is already a departure.

Questions are a declaration of departure.

Arriving at a question in thought or activity is also the creation of a trajectory, of inclining oneself towards an unknown goal, yet not without direction.

A question inclines a departure in a particular way, but a question itself is generic – it propels all modes of seeking some thing. Questions possess the force of bending and swerving ideas/action.

A question is the confrontation and departure from a lack. To arrive at a question is to arrive at a gap in knowledge, action and speech – a gap that cannot be immediately filled in without the inclination towards something other.

A question is indisciplinary; the inclining magnetism of a question knows no disciplinary bounds.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada.